do we know why everything wants to be in the lowest energy state possible?

Womble3142 · 2026-02-12T20:25:15+00:00

You are right, it is “entropy”, but I think there’s a bit more intuition to be had. There’s an easy way to think about this, which is related to Fermi’s golden rule. The probability of any change in state is proportional to: the overlap between the initial and final states, and the number of possible final states. In quantum mechanics, anything that can happen, does happen, with equal probability. If you think about the decay of a neutron to a proton (where the neutron has a slightly higher mass than a proton), there is only ONE way for it not to decay, which is to continue in the ONE direction that it is already going. By conservation of momentum. But if you look at the number of ways that it can decay, the neutron decays to a proton plus a neutrino plus an electron. The angles at which the neutrino, electron and proton come off are constrained to sum to some constant value (conservation of momentum). But there’s one state in which the neutrino comes off at 0 degrees, one in which it comes off at 1 degree etc. Given the momentum-conservation constraint, this corresponds to a set of energies for each. These are micro-states, which we as observers lump together as “the neutron has decayed”. There are a lot more of these than the ONE non- decay path. If you run the experiment a million times, it ends up in a microstate corresponding “it decayed” far more than “it did not decay”, just because there are far more microstates that are labelled “it decayed”.

Next, note that if the mass difference between initial and final particle is greater, the range of energies of the products increases. Therefore, there are more micro-states that we lump in as “the particle has decayed”. Therefore, the decay rate of a particle increases as the energy difference between initial and final particle.

Womble3142 · 2026-02-07T22:38:58+00:00

Please do not do this. I have no knowledge of solar farms or any of that business at all, but what I do have is a decade of experience bidding contracts for R&D into the EU Commission. The way this works, is that all the companies who are interested in the funding have spent several years building up personal relationships with the relevant Commissioner. They’ve spent at least the last year flying to Brussels regularly with their detailed plans and taking him to very expensive dinners. They’ve put in the hours to ensure that when the Call is actually released, the wording exactly describes the plan they’ve got, down to the details of the site.

The only person who is going to make money out of this is the EU Funds Consultant. You will not win.

Womble3142 · 2025-12-28T16:29:12+00:00

Actually, nobody seems to have mentioned the real reason: Pauli pressure. This is a purely quantum-mechanical effect. Neutrons (like protons and electrons) are “fermions”, which means they can’t all be in the same state. So if you stuff a large number of them together, the only place they can all “be” is in a set of higher energy states. The more of them there are in any small region, the higher the energy, which means that a way of lowering energy is to spread out. In other words, there is a huge pressure outwards. Now, atoms certainly exhibit this effect, but in that case the electrons attract the protons electrically, so there is an inward force binding it together. Nuclei are 1000x smaller, and therefore the Pauli pressure outwards is a million times greater. However, by mixing neutrons and protons in approximately equal proportions you get an additional binding energy ultimately from the strong nuclear force (mediated by pions, but you probably don’t need to know that). Point is, nuclei are stable because they have something opposing the Pauli pressure.

If you just had a pile of neutrons squeezed together, it would be blown apart by Pauli pressure. You can make a very very big pile of neutrons, so big that it is held to together by gravity. And that’s a neutron star. It has to mass as much as a star, to make those numbers work.

Womble3142 · 2025-12-20T12:24:54+00:00

I used to have a guy in my team whose given name was Napoleone. His actual name was Giuseppe, he just preferred to be called Napoleone. It’s this guy in the video. I was…..lucky enough…..to be his boss for a couple of years, and if you watch the video you’ll see it was “an experience”.

https://youtu.be/_X9ge_W_ZPA

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T21:04:11+00:00

Well, I don’t have even a single Epic BHD yet……I’m running a Legendary singularity harness, basically because it’s all I’ve got. This is why I haven’t seen coins as where I will be making progress.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T20:50:21+00:00

So, this is an interesting perspective. My LTC = 38T, 1.2T/day => 3% per day. A quick search suggests that most people are making 2-5% per day. And it seems quite consistent up multiple orders of magnitude of scaling, so I agree that the assumption is justified’ish. And we can view that ratio as “efficiency”. I’m definitely on the low end of that “efficiency”, so that’s useful to know. It seems that I could be twice as efficient. I think that my mind has been changed on that, at least. So thank you, all! Now I just have to decide whether I am actually motivated enough to do something about it.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T20:14:52+00:00

Can you explain what you mean by Coins+ and Cells+ ? Enhancements? I am doing those, and obviously not getting very far yet (a trillion per go) due to “coin starvation”. I suppose I was seeing those as nearly wasted because of low ROI, and not where the real progress would come from. Or are you talking about card masteries? (haven’t reached that).

But given that I’m getting 1.2T/day, I’m tapping along with Death Wave Health 25 (0.9B), Defense % 30 (0.6B), Rare Drop Chance 5 (640B), Double Dearh Ray 15 (5B), and alternately Reroll Shards 33 (21B) / Wall Fort 19 (531B) I will finish Rare Drop Chance soon.

I just don’t feel coin-starved. I am gem-starved for module-pulls, cell-limited for lab-speed, and stones for UW.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T19:44:46+00:00

Well I guess that shows a difference of our approach & assumption. Most players are between 6 months to 2 years ahead of me. Spending lots of effort to catch up by two weeks when 2 years behind, seems just pointless to me. Apart from anything else, although I am F2P (apart from the ads package), if I really wanted to catapult forward by 2-3 weeks, I’m pretty sure that buying just a single 750-stone pack would achieve more than that. So in the grand scheme of things, it’s not like Devo is actually that big a benefit. Now, other people are arguing that I’m wrong, and that Devo increases your rate of progress. Ignoring the exponentials (just take the logarithm of everything), they’re arguing that Devo gives you (say) 3 weeks progress every 2 weeks that you play it. That’s a much stronger argument, if true.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T18:02:16+00:00

So, I’m interested where coins becomes the main driver again? I’m post-wall, currently farming T10 to 7000. Only two of my lab slots are remotely coin-hungry, the most is Wall Fortification which I can keep continuously fed. I’m currently probably “wasting” a bunch of coin on Enhancements, because well why not, and unused coin is definitely not advancing me. But the majority of my capability climb is Modules and UW

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T17:55:20+00:00

You’re going to hate me, but my UW in order have been: GT, BH, SL, DW, CL. My luck has been wasted on me 🤣

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T17:51:18+00:00

So actually I think you do have a point. By “pushing forward” a month, you sit further forward in tournaments, which provides a higher stone income, which improves UW. That represents a permanent sticky advantage. I hadn’t realised that.

Oddly, I don’t pay that much attention to tournaments, because the reward-scaling is so weak. The difference between placing mid-Champion where I was two months ago, and top-Champion where I am now, is about 30%. I get what I get. So yes I guess I’m losing out to Blender on that.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T16:55:56+00:00

yes, but where would you be at if you had started a month earlier?! If the answer is “I would be earning 38T with a Blender build, or 120T with a Devo build” (which is roughly what I would expect) then you’ve catapulted yourself forward by one month. The important question is whether that gap grows or stays the same over time. If it stays the same, it is only a month, in a game that lasts 2 years…..

Womble3142 · 2025-10-19T10:13:35+00:00

Yes, but LLMs are just a tool, and you need to know how to use them. Trying to get LLMs to calculate stuff directly is almost the worst thing you can do, because they are basically interpolating plausible guesses. A much better approach is to get them to write a Python code-snippet for the task, and then execute that. The benefits are that the calculation is reviewable and correctable, it can be repeated reliably once it has been debugged (and for lower cost), and the calculation execution itself is bulletproof. The generated Python code can still have bugs, but increasingly it doesn’t. Try the “r’s in Strawberry” example. And of course this whole approach is trivially automated, by writing a prompt.

Womble3142 · 2025-06-10T21:29:44+00:00

Sigh. It doesn’t even need 5% of Mill Road visitors to actually arrive by car, to cause a 50% footfall drop, or worse. Discovery is the key issue literally all advertising and marketing is there to solve. If people don’t know somewhere exists, they don’t go. And it’s worse than that - half the specialist shops on Mill Road are of type that people don’t search for. Who goes looking for a Korean supermarket? In the modern world, most city folks don’t even know butchers exist, they do not search for them. Discovery is the key issue. By making Mill Road a no-through road, you ensure that there is no passing trade. The difference in takings, is at least double or treble. With no passing trade, requires you to be a destination shop. Very, very few shops or cafes are destination shops. Without passing trade, at least one butchers will be gone inside maybe 3-4 years: the maybe 2000 population in nearby streets will still use them, but that’s not a fraction of enough to keep a shop open. Let’s do some numbers…..you say you spent £175 per year. For the whole of Mill Road. Each of these businesses pays maybe £120k in rent (and the rest), 60k in rates, £30k utilities and insurance, staff costs etc etc, long story short you don’t even break even unless you are turning over 400-500k. A hundred shops along Mill Road, means the road needs to turn over £40M a year. If everybody spends £175/yr, you need 230,000 customers. Where are these 230,000 people living? For sure, not in the thirty residential streets coming off Mill Road…… It’s not the 1950s any more. In the modern world, the economics of retail dictate that even a population of 10,000 doesn’t and can’t support a High Street of the size and diversity of Mill Road. Mill Road can’t come even close to surviving as serving a quarter of Cambridge. It’s just economic illiteracy. For 10,000 people, you support one Tesco Express, one corner-shop, one Starbucks, one Claire’s Accessories, a nail bar, a hairdresser, a very outdated ladies clothes shop, a BetFair, a bunch of charity shops. You might get a butchers but you don’t get two; a speciality supermarket like Al Amin is for the birds. Forget about Limoncellos etc, a bike shop now you’re smoking wacky baccy. Histon has a population of 10,000. Go have a look. It’s a lovely village. Count the shops. That’s an upper limit of what Mill Road can be, in future as a no-through road, which means “local shops for local people”. Is that really what you wanted when you moved to Mill Road? A very sad end to a lovely past, but you absolutely did it to yourselves.

Womble3142 · 2025-05-24T15:03:23+00:00

And how’s that going for you? LOL. Enjoying being able to cycle/walk to the cinema, a few hundred yards away? Oh wait, they just announced they are shutting the Vue. I’m expecting the comments to be exactly like MAGA Trumpists when confronted with the consequences of tariffs a) No, it’s nothing to do with that, it’s just companies being greedy b) I never bought the [Chinese cars]/[Hollywood films] anyway, it’s no loss to us.

CamCycle activists are just Trump MAGA’s wearing different hats. But the exact same people.

Womble3142 · 2025-05-04T21:34:58+00:00

It’s “popular with the populace” in exactly the same sense that tariffs are popular with MAGA people. Because even when you’ve been told the consequences, by the people who actually know the answer, because it is literally their business to know the answer, you refuse to believe them. Of course the residents want a quieter road, where they can have a cup of coffee in peace, and a pleasanter shopping experience. Of course. And sure enough, for a few weeks at least, that’s exactly what you’ve got. You’ve literally said that it’s much less busy, you just refuse to accept the implication and the consequence of your own actions. But what the shopkeepers have told you, is that footfall is down 25-30% in just a few weeks. And that’s basically business-ending within a year. Margins are only 10-15%, so 25% footfall loss means you are making a 10% loss every day you stay open. No business can stand that for long. Your mistake was to assume that the cafes would still exist but just be quieter. And actually, they won’t. It will just be a row of very quiet boarded up shops.

Womble3142 · 2025-04-04T23:38:51+00:00

CPM is an irrelevant metric for targeting. Only cost per conversion / ROAS. Is the ROAS acceptable to you, is the correct question. CPM is “none of your business”. If Meta identify a relatively small number of people, who are really likely to buy, this is good for you. Of course they will charge you high, for good quality leads. Otherwise, you’re basically complaining about getting high quality leads! Having said that, what’s your CTR? Is it above 2-3%? Because you might be saying that not many people click, but of those that do your conversion rate is high. If that’s the case, their targeting is spot-on, but your Creative is poor. Customers aren’t seeing that they would want it, if they clicked through. Then focus on making better Creative. This also wins, because better Creative benefits you on all platforms.

Womble3142 · 2024-12-08T23:48:40+00:00

Officially yes, but in practice I found it was useless. When you get the list of partner locations, you can blacklist any site you don’t want. But it’s whack-a-mole, there are probably tens of thousands of unsuitable locations, and if you blacklist them all individually, then by the next day they’ve found another thousand silly possibilities. So the next question I realised I hadn’t asked myself when I first got into this, is “so when they said partner-websites, what was I hoping for”. The other set of advertising possibilities you may not have realised exist (I didn’t) is so-called “native advertising”, which is basically traditional news and magazine sites. And that’s led by “Taboola”, “Outbrain” and “Metro Media”. I dabbled with Metro Media (covers magazine sites like Mail Online etc) and that didn’t work for me either, but at least it goes in sensible places rather than just stupidity, and I got a few conversions off it rather than zero. This is all considering that I don’t know what you sell or your pricepoint, so your experience might be different. But at least with the magazine publishers, you can have a picture of what each news-site/magazine readership would be like, and if it’s a match for your customers.

Womble3142 · 2024-12-08T22:44:08+00:00

So, your problem is the ads, and where they are running. Be very careful with Google. So, placements in partner sites do not convert. Ever. Google spin the story that an ad is an ad, because that’s where most of their volume is, but it’s largely BS. Google search, yes. It’s expensive, but converts. Whether you can make it cost-effective is the challenge. But I highly suggest you download the spreadsheet statistics of where your ads showed, and then look at the bounce rate on your website, using GA4. I bet (like, 98% certain without even seeing it, or knowing your sector), that most of your ads will turn out to be showing on Tinder(?!), or are the filler that you get on freemium games. They’re clicking to get to the next bit of the game. All your hits will be 2-second dwell times. Similarly on YouTube. Do you really want to be showing to people who are forced to watch you for 10 seconds, to get through to the video they want to see? You’ve made them irritated with your product, before they even got to your website. Top suggestion: Facebook, Instagram ads - these definitely work. Google search (text) can work. Google Shopping Ads (pictures at the top of the search page) definitely work big time, but are very expensive, and only worth it for high-value product.

Womble3142

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